“It doesn’t seem to have worked.”

“How’s that?”

“They couldn’t keep this one away from you.”

He grinned suddenly, showing clean if misaligned teeth. “I can get anything out of there,” he said. “Anything.”

“Really.”

“You name a book and I’ll lift it. I’ll tell you, I could bring you one of the stone lions if the price was right.”

“We’re a little crowded around here just now.”

He tapped Lepidopterae. “Sure you can’t use this? I could probably ease up a little on the price.”

“I don’t do much volume in natural history. But that’s beside the point. I honestly don’t buy library books.”

“That’s a shame. It’s the only kind I deal in.”

“A specialist.”

He nodded. “I’d never take anything from a dealer, an independent businessman struggling to make ends meet. And I’d never steal from a collector. But libraries-” He set his shoulders, and a muscle worked in his chest. “I was a graduate student for a long time,” he said. “When I wasn’t asleep I was in a library. Public libraries, university libraries. I spent ten months in London and never got out of the British Museum. I have a special relationship with libraries. A love-hate relationship, I guess you’d call it.”

“I see.”

He closed his attaché case, fastened its clasps. “They’ve got two Gutenberg Bibles in the library of the British Museum. If you ever read that one of them disappeared, you’ll know who got it.”

“Well,” I said, “whatever you do, don’t bring it here.”

A couple of hours later I was sipping Perrier and telling Carolyn Kaiser all about it. “All I could think of,” I said, “was that it looked like a job for Hal Johnson.”

“Who?”

“Hal Johnson. An ex-cop now employed by the library to chase down overdue books.”